"This week, tons of websites are reporting that Apple is catching up with Android when it comes to U.S. smartphone market share. The reports are based on some new data from Nielsen, a metrics company that measures smartphone use. The only problem: people are completely misinterpreting the data." Numbers are fickle beings.

Misinterpreted data or not, it's clear at the building I work in (where there are a lot of traditionally Apple "artsy-creative-barista" types, mind you) and at the malls that Android is indeed getting more users, at least on smartphones. Tablets are another story.

But as much as I like the whole open-ness(?) thing and Android's modularity, I personally wouldn't mind if Google lost some market share to competitors. Maybe not to Apple (who seem to be doing well enough), but to MS (as much as I despise them) or some other party ideally.

Competition is always a good thing. Keeps everyone on their toes. Google in particular seem to be getting complacent in some areas. They seem to be giving stinky carriers more power when it should be the opposite. None of the Android devices offer anything close to decent battery-life in my opinion (more the fault of the manufacturers than Google's, but whatever) Their marketplace, while improved, is still a turdy wild-west that doesn't attract developers of apps that cater to serious/creative professionals (music production and mixing for example). TBH, I think Google needs to apply degree of hard-vetting at this point, maybe not Apple levels of dictatorship, but at least some sort of "tier-1, tier-2, tier-3" type separation between apps.

Yeah, I'll probably get modded down or lambasted for not making much sense in a Fandroid's eyes, but whatever.... meh

Edit:
Sorry if I seem ranty. I've just spent the last few hours battling funky Eclipse plug-ins. >_<

That's the saddest part about the death of Maemo/MeeGo-Harmattan. Nokia are keeping a lot of what made it so good on the N9 (I might be biased since I own that handset). One could probably put out a QT based OS with MerOS or a HTML5 alternative on Tizen, but unless they can prize Swipe-UI and algorithms for the haptic feedback away from the new Nokiasoft and manufacture a handset with a similar concave screen, it'll be pretty useless.

Shame Nokia only dropped a few N910s into developer hands on loan instead of doing a propper manufacturing run and letting us nerds get one by retail. It looked to be a very nice upgrade from the N900 hardware and shipped withe he new OS.

I'd have liked to see it keep more of the Debian heritage but such is life. At least it would have provided a more complete and viable OS distribution than the IOS prison and Android stained class window fragments.

A friend of mine has a Nokia N9 and it's the greatest phone I've seen. The hardware is just stunning. It's beautiful, solid, well-designed. The software is quite nicely thought too. It's kind of minimalist and I like it a lot. Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of apps available and it's based on a dying OS.

I feel like this is really a phone that could be marketed to the mass (contrary to the N900 or other meego/maemo phones on which the software wasn't that polished). But instead of doing that, Nokia made it a dead phone even before launching it.. That's really sad.

That is because free > open > closed
Market share doesn't agree but then again market is dumb.

Give me a phone without any OS and let me install multi boot with openmoko and Meego and I'll pay as much as €2000 for it, even with a crappy camera. Compiling my own kernel on my phone would be much more fun than all the Angry birds and fruit ninjas in the world.

As an avid android fan: I miss webOS phones. That stuff looked good, imho. We need more competition, and webOS really looked like it could be more like android than like the other two systems (RIM? What RIM?).
Oh well, the smartphone market is a fickle one, it would seem.

When competitors such as Samsung are pulling out amazing phones like the S2? After using it, the screen on the 4S feels tiny and the phone too thick..
At the same time phones like the Motorola Defy or Sony Xperia mini, which are target for the low end, are still extremely powerful 2.3 phones, so people gets hooked from the bottom line.
Apple phones don't even feel like top-line anymore, so I sure hope try something new for the iphone 5..

The previous definition of market share threw up a red flag for me as well. One could talk about market share in different ways: units sold, the sum of sale prices, units in use, etc. We regularly talk about windows xp's large market share despite it not having been sold officially by ms for years.

I agree with everyone else, the more competition the better. Even if I don't like one party, it's better that they're there to keep others competitive. It is bad that webos tablets were discontinued. It would be a shame to end up with only three viable market players.

We need economic systems which do more to discourage monopolies and oligopolies from taking over our markets - ideally in a fully automatic and natural way, since courts and politicians are bound to screw it up when they have to intervene.

Also, term "market share" is being applied to markets that don't involve any "sales" at all. Even your term "web share", which I've never heard before, could be interpreted ambiguously too.

Are you counting distinct users? Distinct devices? Total hits? Total page counts? Total registered users? Do we attempt to factor in page caches or privacy blockers? We've long moved away from raw "hits", as simple as they are, because they tend to be correlated heavily to website implementation details rather than meaningful user data. Online businesses are often interested in unique visitors, however they usually resort to counting unique devices instead. But that's imperfect when users delete cookies. You can attempt to use IP addresses and browser fingerprinting. Saying X has Y% "web share", doesn't clarify any of the details used to create the metric. It may not matter, but the metric is still ambiguous.

Now I understand the personal desire to be pedantic and nail terms down to have precise meanings, however you'll have to admit that, given today's common usage, what is meant when an author says "market share" can differ from what you believe the terminology should mean. So it's not all together unwarranted to ask what is meant whenever the term is used.

I usually define market share as as the ratio of units sold relative to the entire sales market.

I use installed base for the ratio of product installed relative to all devices in the area of interest.

And I use webshare as the ratio of the number of hits with a given http header label to a broad sampling of websites relative to all hits.

So in 4Q11 the iPhone had about a 52% webshare, a 44% market share, and a 28% installed base - probably because (as stated) the iPhone 4S is getting a high volume of sales to replace older iPhones, and a lot of iPhone apps monitor websites in Net Applications' market.

As an unrelated aside, desktop Linux has about a 1.5% webshare (up 50% last year!) and a near 0% market share. Estimates for installed base (given it's mostly an after-market install) are all over the map, which is what makes debating it so much fun. :-D

I do not believe I've ever heard the term "webshare, but I understand how it could resolve some ambiguity.

Now, the term market share has been used historically to illistrate how much of a particular stream of revenue a particular company has. Viewed this way, we can sort of see how difficult it would be to do with the smartphone market.

So many different players, and they all take some of the profits in each one of those for each phone model and make. I pitty the fool that has that errand, unless they have an amazing salary, in which case I herby copywrite/copyrite/copyright/patent/ Community design this approach to marketplace analysis in the name of Bill, shooter of Bul. All violators will be subject to imersification.

Nielsen didn't provide any info explicitly describing the change in overall market share, so I went back and pulled its last set of published numbers, showing U.S. smartphone market share for the third quarter of 2011. In those numbers, Android was at 42.8 percent and Apple was at 28.3 percent of the overall smartphone market. In the new quarter-four numbers, Android is at 46.3 percent while Apple is at 30 percent. Data from ComScore, another independent metrics company, shows a similar scenario.

So did Apple grow in overall smartphone market share from the third to fourth quarter? Sure. But so did Android. And Android grew quite a bit more, gauging by Nielsen's measurements -- twice as much, with a total share increase of 3.5 points compared to Apple's 1.7. Despite the boost in iPhone sales following the launch of the iPhone 4S, the gap between the two platforms has actually continued to widen.

Damn facts. Always getting in the way of a good story.

What surprised me is that I had seen the faulty conclusions quoted in reputable newspapers as fact. Do journalists do any fact-checking any more?

What surprised me is that I had seen the faulty conclusions quoted in reputable newspapers as fact. Do journalists do any fact-checking any more?

The "great state of journalism from the past" is largely a myth, anyway (and ending your question with "any more" itself an expression of myths into which humans fall & propagate, responsible also for so called bad journalism).

In the past, there was hardly any way to reasonably verify stories, much less opportunities to stumble on anything which would cast some doubt on them, so of course the audiences remember them as more "reliable" - and we have the archives, we know how ridiculous many were (too often, say, just a thinly veiled propaganda; seriously, check for yourself: follow for a year some random "reputable newspaper" on the day of each issue plus a century)

Come on, fairly recent past holds a gem called outright "policy by press release" - but how many people still believe in the myths of bomber or missile (or mineshaft...) gaps?
How many are aware of the whole background and real outcomes of, say, even something as profound like Cuban missile crisis?
How many realize about Team B? (some really curious names associated with this one) Nurse Nayirah?

And there's how people tend to remember the past as much better than it was ...maybe it helps us to cope with how better it actually is "now" in most cases of "now" (generally, how we like to believe in the reliability of our very poor memory - for one example in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyewitness_identification - or, overall, our mind: go through a list of cognitive biases)

Kinda like the text made popular by one Baz Luhrmann single...

Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

This article means nothing, when you remember that Andrioid makers sell dozens of different models of phones all the way from crap giveaways to the Galaxy Nexus, each one running a different version of the Android OS, and most never to be updated from the version they ship with.